I continue to be baffled by the New York Times’s views on immigration. Where are their appeals for sympathy for Pakistanis in Pakistan and Mexicans in Mexico? More specifically why does someone coming here illegally have a greater demand on our sympathy than his or her countrymen who haven’t?
Am I wrong in my reading of history that our “sense of who we are” doesn’t extend to everybody everywhere? Is that a good thing or a bad one?
Immigration is one of the many issues on which I really long to see a measured national dialogue but find nearly every conceivable position shouted down by emotional opponents. If I had my way we’d dramatically (as in by at least an order of magnitude) increase the work visas available to Mexicans and then vigorously enforce our current laws with most of the enforcement coming at the workplace. I’d also require more rigor in the area of student and tourist visas than we have now. Once here it’s all too easy just to disappear into the crowd.
I think we should be using immigration to improve and enrich American life and the American economy. I don’t see why we should be bashful about this. We should be making it very easy for the well-educated, the entrepreneurial, the creative people in any country to emigrate to the US. A Pakistani physicist or Taiwanese artist or Ghanaian businessman should find it easy to move to the US. We turn a profit on those people. It’s free human capital, why aren’t we scooping it up with both hands?
We should also find a legal way to get the fruit picked in the San Fernando Valley. Since I’m not picking grapes, and you’re not picking grapes, I’m thinking we’re going to have to work some version of your approach to get the grapes picked.
Simply stated, it’s not that simple. Importing foreign-trained workers depresses wages for workers in the same field already here. We’re not creating jobs for physicists in the United States. The reason that we aren’t graduating more American physics majors is that American students know that. Why put yourself into debt and study something hard if there’s no job waiting for you when you’re done?
A couple of years ago the IEEE reported that the unemployment rate for electrical engineers was the highest in history here and the number of jobs created for electrical engineers in this country was about the same as the number of H1-B visas issued for electrical engineers.
We need to start creating jobs for people with skills here and for that to happen we need to invest more capital here.
This isn’t a new problem: except in healthcare and home construction we’ve been underinvesting for a decade.
Smart, talented people often (not always) find a way to create wealth. We didn’t have jobs for all the programmers and techies at Google until Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the company. Brin’s father was a mathematician. He brought Sergey from Russia to the US when the kid was six. Smart, well-educated guy brought his smart kid to our country and generated jobs and wealth. Maybe there’d have been a wholly home-grown Google, but then again, maybe not.
Immigration has always depressed wages of Americans already here. Right now immigrants are depressing the wages of theoretical American grape-pickers. After all, there’s a dollar amount out there somewhere that would motivate me to pick grapes. So why is it okay when we’re depressing the wages of grape pickers and not okay when it comes around to the white collar and tech jobs?
Bring the grape-picker family into the US and we get our grapes picked. Bring the Brins into the country we get Google. No guarantees, as we discussed in another post, but on balance the odds are better for the little math whiz than for the little agricultural worker. The USSR covered the costs of the elder Brin’s education and we got the benefit.
Incidentally, in my line of work I compete against people across all national boundaries. Anyone who can write in the English language, regardless of nationality, can compete with me. But at the same time I can write from anywhere, so wouldn’t it make a lot of sense for, say, Britain or France to throw open its doors, make me a citizen, collect my taxes and let me compete from their country rather than from the US if I were willing to do so?
Actually, no. Until the last thirty years the marginal utility of labor had been going up for the entirety of the country’s history (translation: pay rates had been rising). That’s changed.
Over the last ten years we’ve created fewer jobs than the number of people who’ve entered the workforce over that period and the jobs that have been created have been in areas that have been highly subsidized: government, healthcare, education (translation: without the subsidy those jobs wouldn’t have been created, either).
Something is very different with the U. S. economy. I don’t entirely know what it is but something has changed.
Let’s blame Bush.
You’d have to set-up some kind of system for the work visas so that the people coming into the country on them could move around between jobs. There’s a lot of bad memories, particularly in the Mexican-American sector, about earlier “work visa” style programs, such as the Bracero Program, because these programs basically put the responsibility for distributing and maintaining the visas in the hands of the companies hiring the migrant labor, which led to a number of abuses.
When you’re baffled by some entity’s powerful advocacy of someone or something, an advocacy unconnected to any coherent moral or logical system, the first thing to do is check and see who’s on the other side of the question.